A Russian Cossack riding among refugees fleeing before a Central Power advance. The Russians adopted a scorched-earth policy in the months-long retreat before the German-Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive of the spring, summer, and fall 1915, with Cossacks accused of burning homes and crops to deny them to the advancing enemy, and to prevent civilians from remaining behind and providing intelligence to the invader.
Il Cammino della CiviltàThe Path of Civilization
"All day long we jolted along the plains or through woodlands, and wherever we looked we could see the moving figures of homeless people. It was said that the Cossacks had received orders to force all inhabitants of villages and hamlets to leave their homes, lest they be made to act as spies and, in order that the enemy should encounter widespread devastation in his progress, the homesteads were set on fire and crops destroyed.Thus a new word was added to our daily vocabulary — that of refugee, and from that day onward for many weeks to come the life of our Unit was closely interwoven with that of the refugees. Their plight was heart-rending."
Frances Farmborough, an English teacher in Moscow when war broke out, trained for and joined a Red Cross unit serving with the Russian Army. By late June, 1915, the joint German-Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive, launched on May 2, had broken the Russian front, splitting the northern and southern armies, and driving the Russians back hundreds of miles. For these months, Farmborough's account is of the ongoing, brutal retreat.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 83, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
1915-06-26, 1915, June, refugee, Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive, retreat, Russian retreat, Farmborough
